I like guns. That's a difficult admission, as if confessing to some kind of perversion, though it ought not to be. People like all kinds of things: cars, sailboats, acoustic guitars, fountain pens, Swiss watches, split-cane fly rods, canoes. Nobody has to justify liking these things, as I am continually asked to justify liking guns. My reason is simple: shooting is fun, just as blasting music is fun, or canoeing, or fly fishing, or driving a powerful car at irresponsible speeds. Nobody thinks you're weird for liking power tools.

But people are likely to think you're weird for liking guns. In their eyes, you become one of those gun nuts. And although I like guns, I do not like gun nuts. I do not like hearing people talk about keeping a gun handy to deal with goblins, or to resist socialism, or to survive the coming collapse. And in the aftermath of a gun-related tragedy, of a Newtown or an Aurora, I detest the voices that squawk about their right to bear arms in the face of suggestions that, you know, maybe we should make guns just a little bit more difficult for the average person with homicidal intent to buy. I like guns, in other words, but I'm uncomfortable with gun culture.

Courtesy of Biblioasis

In this young millennium gun culture has grown more radical and less tolerant of any who depart from its tenets. If you own guns, it is increasingly taken as given that you must believe even the most tentative gun control is at best futile and at worst a step toward the total confiscation of all firearms by a totalitarian state. And you are assumed also to hold a set of shared beliefs on any number of subjects completely unrelated to guns, on partisan politics and government and climate change and environmental regulations and religion and whether the war in Iraq was a good idea, as if your gun had come with a free, bonus ideological Family Pack, a ready-made identity. The NRA has become a partisan political machine, demanding all gun owners join the fight. Anyone who breaks ranks is a traitor to the cause.

But what is gun culture? It's all well and good to talk about "the gun culture" in tones of deep disapproval, as people do, but unless we know what we actually mean by gun culture we risk falling prey to what the American poet and novelist Jim Harrison called "the hideously mistaken idea that talking is thinking." And gun culture is a slippery concept.

"Gun culture" most often denotes that strange and paranoid corner of America represented by the NRA at its most strident. But the idea of a gun culture originally included us all, even if we experienced guns only through TV, movies, or 'Battlefield: Bad Company.' The historian Richard Hofstadter coined the expression in a 1970 essay in the magazine 'American Heritage,' in which he contended not that America has a gun culture, that America contains a gun culture, or that America tolerates a gun culture, but that America is a gun culture — that the gun as a symbol is so deeply ingrained within the American character as to be inseparable from Mom, apple pie, and all the rest.

Early in 2014, Slide Fire Solutions, a manufacturer of bump stocks, put up billboards in Chicago bearing three images, side by side: a baseball mitt folded around a ball, an apple pie, and an AR-15-style rifle equipped with a Slide Fire bump stock. Across the bottom of the billboard was a row of symbols: the Statue of Liberty, an ichthys (the Jesus fish), an American flag as stylized for military uniforms, and an oval containing "2A," referring to the Second Amendment. This is what makes America great: God, Liberty, and Guns. Here we find a gun culture within the broader gun culture that is America, a culture that declares the gun to be as American as Mom and apple pie and as sacred as Jesus himself. This is the gun culture I detest: the corner of the American mind that takes the rifle for a crucifix. And its adherents increasingly presume to speak for everyone who owns a gun.